I lived in Savannah for a few years back in the late 80s. And hated it. It’s a very insular city full of people who don’t know that the world has changed since 1962.

It has a pretty good black middle class because of all the industry there to provide decent jobs, and some of them have busted into the political establishhment. I noted there were black folks running as Republicans, because the old Democratic party in Savannah was an ingrown, moribund operation. The city is also full of white people who think that everything was just hunky-dorey in the old days, and that no, there was never any race problem! So I guess that could be how somebody like Paula Deen could be so clueless for so long.

My first visit to Savannah was when my car broke on the outskirts, and I had to leave it at a garage to get fixed, take a Greyhound home, and then back to get the car. I arrived at the Greyhound station and asked a local white kid where I’d catch a city bus to the part of town where the garage was. He cheerfully told me I could fnd a bus stop by “Just go out and stand wherever you see a nigger!” Eyeeww.

About 1960 the city tore down it’s old railroad terminal and in its place built a little box-like affair for the now much much reduced passenger service. I walked in one evening to look at it. It had two men’s rooms, and two women’s rooms. Natch. I looked at that and thought that the Kohler company must have made a killing all those years whenever an order came in from the South!